Publications by authors named "Cicero R Pereira"

Article Synopsis
  • Racial disparities in clinical recommendations can lead to significant health disparities, with implicit racial attitudes among healthcare providers being a key factor.
  • A study involving 210 White medical trainees found that those with stronger implicit biases towards White individuals provided fewer words and treatment options for Black patients compared to White patients.
  • The results highlight the subtle yet harmful effects of implicit bias in healthcare and emphasize the importance of understanding how these attitudes influence clinical decision-making.
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Background: While the existence of a complex variety of casual sexual relationships (CSRs) has been acknowledged, studies rarely describe the prevalence of condom use across these relationships or how their hybrid nature, specifically relationship characteristics, affect condom use. This study aims to describe condom use within committed relationships and various types of casual sexual relationships (CSRs), examining the influence of relationship characteristics on condom use among culturally validated relationship types (committed, friends with benefits, hookups, booty call).

Methods: Emerging adults (N = 728, 18-29 years, M = 22.

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Time is fundamental to organizing all aspects of human life. When invested in relationships, it has a psychological meaning as it indicates how much individuals value others and their interest in maintaining social relationships. Previous research has identified an intergroup time bias (ITB) in racialized social relations, defined as a discriminatory behavior in which White individuals invest more time in evaluating White than Black individuals.

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Objectives: Drawing on theories of distributive justice and intergroup discrimination, we examined how much distributive justice criterion and racial group membership contribute to bias in healthcare allocation decisions, by testing a theoretical model that specifies perceived stereotypicality and individual responsibility as a serial mediation process in the relationship between disease's contraction controllability (controllable vs. non-controllable) and bias in medical decision-making.

Method: White Portuguese medical students (N = 213) participated in an online experimental study conducted in two phases.

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The COVID -19 pandemic dramatically affected people's lives. In this study, we explored the role of social and personal factors underlying individuals' adaptive responses during the critical onset period of the outbreak. In particular, we tested two models on the mediating role of health-protective behaviors in the relationship between social support, resilience, and helping behavior.

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Psychological impacts of Vitiligo have been demonstrated, and associations of the skin disease with anxiety and depression disorders have already been shown. However, it is still unclear the role of individuals' personality factors, such as neuroticism, stress, and rumination, as well as sociodemographic characteristics of people with Vitiligo in such disorders. We conducted a study in a community sample of individuals with Vitiligo (N = 324) aiming to test the hypothesis that neuroticism, stress, and rumination are subjacent to these individuals' anxiety and depression symptomatology.

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Self-esteem is a crucial human nature feature for understanding the social dimensions of individuals' self-concept. One of its characteristics is peoples' malleability to adapt to social contexts, that is, the state self-esteem (SSE). Individuals express SES in three different factors: performance; social success; and physical appearance.

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Sexual violence is ubiquitous in the history of human relationships, with the victim being perceived as responsible for their own misfortune. This phenomenon is labelled secondary victimization and is manifested in blaming, minimizing the suffering, and avoiding the victim. This article presents evidence of the validity of a scale that measures individual differences in these three types of secondary victimization of rape victims.

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Casual sexual relationships (CSRs) are frequent relationship experiences in young adulthood that provide opportunities for many to explore sexual relationships and to construct their sexual identity. Empirical research on casual sex is still lacking outside North-American countries, despite evidence pointing to the need to contextualize sexual interactions in their own sociocultural context. In order to better understand casual sexual relationships, these should be examined in with novel samples in other countries where a "hookup culture" as it is described in the North-American university campus is apparently absent.

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Background: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have been associated with a greater risk of later criminal offending. However, existing research in this area has been primarily conducted in Western developed countries and cross-cultural studies are rare.

Objectives: This study examined the relationship between ACEs and criminal behaviors in young adults living in 10 countries located across five continents, after accounting for sex, age, and cross-national differences.

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Support for Gay Conversion Therapy may be motivated by homophobic prejudice driven by conservative groups. We propose that Support for Gay Conversion Therapy (SGCT) is motivated by conservatism and that this relationship is mediated by prejudice against gay individuals. We tested these hypotheses in three studies.

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Unlabelled: Casual sexual relationships (CSR) are increasingly common but limited empirical research has addressed their terminology and distinctive characteristics. This study sought to identify the most clear-cut terms and to consider how culture-sensitive characteristics distinguish casual sexual relationships among Portuguese emerging adults ( = 262, 18-29 years old). We combined two qualitative studies - one by association and another by free recall - to ascertain the clarity of the terms, plus a quantitative study to further characterize and differentiate them.

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This article aims to examine the role of Belief in a Just World (BJW) in the legitimation of economic inequality. Using data from 27 European countries (=47,086), we conducted multilevel analyses and found that BJW positively predicted the legitimation of economic inequality, measured by three indicators: the perceived fairness of the overall wealth inequality, and the fairness of the earnings made by the Top 10% and the Bottom 10% of society. These results persisted after controlling for individual- and country-level variables.

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Positive distinctiveness threat is central for understanding ingroup bias, but its role in gender differences in the expression of sexual prejudice is not yet satisfactorily elucidated. We analyzed this issue by proposing that sexual prejudice is a defensive reaction to ensure intergroup distinctiveness, so that heterosexual men are more prejudiced against homosexuals than heterosexual women because they strive more for positive distinctiveness. In Study 1 ( = 232), we found that men exhibited more prejudice against gay men than lesbians, while women did not significantly differentiate their prejudice against these target groups.

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Situations of public calamity, such as that caused by COVID-19 pandemic, strongly impact mental health, especially among people who feel most anxious about the imminence of death, as highlighted by the Terror Management Theory. In this research, we investigated how and under which conditions concerns about death itself and anxiety are related to psychological well-being. Specifically, we assessed the role of fear caused by the prominence of death (contextual and dispositional) in anxiety and well-being during the pandemic.

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The objective of the present research is to develop and validate the COVID-19 Anxiety Scale (CAS). We conducted three studies to gather evidence regarding content and construct validity, as well to evaluate the reliability of the measure. Study 1 is subdivided into two studies.

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Aim: This study investigates the joint role of volitional predictors of oral hygiene behaviours of flossing and brushing in adults with gingivitis, framed by the Health Action Process Approach model (HAPA).

Materials And Methods: In a longitudinal online survey, 201 participants aged 18-75, of which 56.7% were women, completed assessments at baseline(T1), 2 weeks(T2) and 4 months(T3).

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: The main purpose of this study was to investigate the factor structure of the Beck Depression Inventory - Second Edition (BDI-II) in a sample of adults. Specifically, we evaluated the BDI-II based on confirmatory factor analysis of different measurement models, and compared the optimal factor structure of the BDI-II by gender using measurement invariance analysis. : A cross-sectional survey with 717 community-dwelling adults was conducted.

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Black and poor people are more frequently convicted of committing crimes. However, the specific role played by skin color and social class in convicting a person has yet to be clarified. This article aims to elucidate this issue by proposing that belonging to a lower social class facilitates the conviction of black targets and that this phenomenon is because information about social class dissimulates racial bias.

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Although there is a vast bibliography on the negative consequences of unemployment for mental health, there are no studies that analyze the differences between men and women in relation to the consequences that unemployment could have simultaneously on self-esteem and depression. The main objective of this study was to analyze whether, unemployment is differentially associated with the self-esteem of men and women, and to test whether this circumstance can be considered a psychological mechanism by which we could explain differences in depression for men and women. Results show that self-esteem is a mediating variable (indirect effect = .

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This study aimed to assess the risks and opportunities associated with Facebook usage and to explore the moderating role of psychosocial (mal)adjustment, nationality and age in these relationships. This correlational study involved a sample of 452 Brazilian and 500 Portuguese youths, aged between 14 and 20 years. Results showed that these youths spent a daily average of 61-120 minutes on Facebook, three to four times per week, displaying a positive attitude towards its use.

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Using representative probabilistic samples of Portuguese citizens and framed by an intergroup perspective, we carried out two studies aiming to address how national identification and belief in a just world (BJW) jointly predict secondary victimization of an ingroup as a whole (specifically ingroup blame). We conducted Study 1 ( = 779) in 2014, at the height of the European austerity policies imposed on Portugal by an institutional outgroup, specifically the Troika (the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund). Study 2 ( = 1140) was conducted after the Troika intervention.

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Article Synopsis
  • The article explores how legitimizing discriminatory behavior can protect self-esteem by analyzing how perceived threats can justify such behavior.
  • In three studies, participants reported lower self-esteem after realizing their own discrimination, but this effect was diminished when they perceived their actions as justified by threats.
  • Results indicated that more egalitarian individuals experienced a decrease in self-esteem due to discrimination awareness, while less egalitarian individuals were more concerned about their social image instead.
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Objective: Immigrants tend to receive a lower quality of healthcare, which can be a sign of healthcare bias. We examined whether this bias in medical care is associated with a legitimizing process involving two psychosocial factors: threat perception and level of intergroup contact.

Method: One hundred eighty six Portuguese health professionals (55.

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